Leaving Mauritania

I spent the following day chatting to Ane & Til, who with Wolfgang made up the party of Land Cruisers. We were going to be an interesting group, Ane spoke German & English, Til, the same with some French and Wolfgang, who's vehicle I'd be travelling in spoke only German. Having spent 5 years at school slogging away at German with a teacher I really didn't like; my German was almost completely forgotten. That and the fact that I'd been speaking entirely in French on the trip apart from interpretations for Julian and some Japanese when I had the chance; the German language wasn't very forthcoming.

Our final night in NBD I asked them if they wanted to join me at Les Trois Etoiles as I wanted to have a final meal there and say goodbye to Aiwa & her parents. They had spent the previous night at a Chinese towards Camping Abba and had come to the same conclusion as me; Chinese in Mauritania isn't a great idea!!

We all trooped into Les Trois Etoiles, quite what they thought of it on entering I don't know but it's not the flashiest of places and the lighting is a bit dim. Looking at the menu on the wall they were suprised by the prices and asked me what was good. I ordered four plates of corbine, Hitoshi-san, the Japanese guy from the night before came in to join us and I have to say that everyone was genuinely suprised by the quality of the meal and the price of the bill!!! Little Aiwa was up to her normal tricks and whilst sitting on Ane's lap, mimicked everything Til did!!

Getting back to La Baie du Levrier, Ali invited me & my new found friends for a tea in the tent, we had a long chat about roads and the problems of the NBD coastline with Africans from Mali & further afield all trying to leave the coast heading for the Canaries and the 'gold' streets of Europe. This explained the police presence the day before, apparently a small boat with 65 on board who had all paid 300euros to get to the Canaries set sail at night from NBD the other side of the peninsula from Kosando. Within 2hrs the tide had brought them back around the peninsula to Kosando with the police waiting for them ... the Mauritanians take a dim view of other African's and send them directly home to Mali, Senegal, Burkino Faso etc ... on the Mauritanian taxpayers cost!

We left the next morning, a convoy of two German Land Cruisers belting out of NBD dodging donkeys, bicycles and taxis until we reached the police post where we were asked for pain killers by the police who had a friend with toothache! A sly ploy to extract money from us which didn't work!

Crossing the Mauritanian border, one of the policemen recognised me and was suprised I was leaving so quickly, after 10 days I wasn't happy about going north again but work called in France! Arriving on the Moroccan border it was bedlam again, trucks everywhere and everyone pushing to get their papers stamped before the border shut for lunch at 12.15pm. It was already 11.30am and I was getting a bit worried we would be stuck there for the border guards 2hr lunch break. Wolfgangs car documents went flying in the wind with Ane & I chasing them before they went out of the compound into the possibly land-mined sands the other side. I got chatting to one of the customs men asking him to stay open until we got our passports stamped so that we could clear the vehicles through customs. I explained it all to Til & Ane who translated it back to Wolfgang. My conversations with Wolfgang were quite funny with sentences in German, hand language and then the verb at the end of the sentence usually forgotten until Wolfgang reminded me of the vocabularly I needed.